Incidents of Children Crossing Texas Border on Rise Again

More and more children once again are being captured crossing the border from Mexico into Texas. Numbers for the last two months confirm a trend Breitbart Texas has been reporting on for over a year.

The White House expressed surprise in September when the numbers of unaccompanied minors and incomplete families again began to surge in numbers, Breitbart Texas reported. The White House tried to downplay the numbers as “lover than last year.” “We have seen, just in the last month, in the month of August, a surprising uptick,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest in a press conference at the time. “That is something that is concerning.”

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That the White House would be “surprised” by this uptick in the numbers of children crossing the southern border is quite surprising in its own right. In April, Senator Ted Cruz warned the White House about the coming surge of children and broken families, as Breitbart’s Caroline May reported. She reported that in the first part of this fiscal year the number of unaccompanied alien children (UACs) was already more than 12,500. While that number was lower than the 2014 numbers at that time, it is still a substantial increase over normal years.

In November, May reported that over 81,000 UACs had been placed in homes across the U.S. 53,518 of those were placed during the current fiscal year. The number of UACs that were captured crossing the border for FY2015 was 39,970, mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

The numbers during the early fall period of the last few months are now at the highest levels for the past six years, according to Border Patrol numbers reported by the Houston Chronicle. In the past two months alone, 7,390 UACs were captured in Texas while crossing the border from Mexico. This reflects an 85 percent increase over the same period last year.

“We’re clearly seeing a significant uptick,” Marc Rosenblum, deputy director at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington D.C. told the Chronicle. He confirmed that the slump of arrivals earlier this year may have been an anomaly, and that the recent numbers are in line with what trend lines predicted years ago.

The numbers now indicate that child arrivals for the past two months “far exceed those that arrived in the same period following the summer influx that peaked in June last year,” the Chronicle reported.

In June, 2014, Breitbart Texas managing director Brandon Darby shocked the world with leaked photos showing massive numbers of UACs being warehoused in inhumane conditions in facilities that were clearly not designed to hold the numbers being detained.

Numbers in the Rio Grande Sector where the Texas DPS is engaged in a surge to try and stop the flood of illegal crossing and other illegal activities are up again substantially, the Chronicle report states. The numbers for August and September reflect the highest totals in six years.

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas and is a member of the original Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.